BRIC POP: The Blog

Indian pop culture pundits often like to point to quantity as a benchmark for excellence: the most movies, the largest number of newspapers, the longest novel, the most books sold per capita.  “Superlative” can just be abbreviated to “Super!”

However, in literature, especially English-language literature, quality is as much a factor, maybe more.  People jump to literature = Russia in the BRIC sweepstakes, and with good reason.  But Tagore picked up a Nobel 45 years before Pasternak, and Rushdie’s allegory of the nation’s difficult birth is shaping up to be the best novel of the last century.

Even before I started on the BRIC Pop project, Midnight’s Children was my favorite book.  I love history.  I love magical realism.  I love humor.  It has an overabundance of all three — you couldn’t exactly call it ‘restrained’.

While immersing myself in India, I read all the great works, from Tagore to Seth to Roy, but there’s only so much saffron, villages, families, and backwaters you can read before it all starts feeling the same.  My wish was for contemporary stories about India to be told, but nobody was telling them.

Then India’s best selling English-language book was published.  Chetan Bhagat became a publishing sensation through the old fashioned adage, “write what you know.”  What Chetan knew was what young India wanted to know:  academic life at the highly competitive Indian Institute of Technology, the vagaries of working in call centers, how Indians relate to the rest of the world, and the frustrations of young people navigating between yesterday and tomorrow’s India.

The poster for "Hello", the film based on One Night @ the Call Center

His blockbuster, One Night @ the Call Center, was also a case study of marketing and pricing strategy.  (As were his other titles, Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT and The Three Mistakes of My Life).  Indian books in general are inexpensive, rarely more than 500 rupees (about US$12), but at 95 rupees (a little over $2), Bhagat’s books are easy for middle-class young Indians to drop in the shopping basket.

The only problem is, while the subject matter is wholly contemporary, the writing isn’t up to the quality of great Indian literature.  And Bhagat is the best of the mass-market bunch.  Many of the books are poorly written, the pricing is driving down the entire industry, and the content is facile.  It’s the Bollywoodization of Indian literature.  I like that these writers are trying to say something fresh about the modern Indian condition, but the books are excruciating to read.

I thought I might have my wish fulfilled for excellent contemporary Indian fiction when I devoured The White Tiger, by former Time South Asian correspondent Aravind Adiga, in a single sitting.  It was topical: about the divide between urbanized “India Shining” and the poor and struggling country folk on the fringes of the system.  It was well-written: colorful, imaginative, perfect bait for a Booker Prize, which it deservedly won last year.  And it was funny.  Adiga called bullshit on the venality of modern India and exposed the cracks in the system.  Some reviewers called it Dickensian; I thought it more in the vein of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis’s political and social exposes of a similar early 20th century America.

Adiga with the 2008 Booker Prize

In my search for a well-written novel about contemporary Indian life, The White Tiger was close, but not quite.  More contemporary that most of its high-lit bretheren, and better written than the mass-market call-center pulp, it still had a nagging tendency to keep pushing the story toward its larger societal meaning, when the story could stand on its own just fine.  The conceit of a series of letters from the protagonist Balram to Wen Jiabao practically screamed “look at the bigger social picture!  Look!”  OK, I’ll look — stop shouting at me.  Adiga’s follow up book of short stories, Between the Assassinations, is now being released in the Anglosphere.  I’m looking forward to reading it, but I think that my hopes that Adiga would bring me my Great New Indian Novel are slipping away.  Big giant title framing stories that have to mean more than they do.  Just write me a story about tourist touts, software engineers, or design students — that’s the great new India.

Maybe the novel doesn’t have to be a novel.  I was quite taken with Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor, the inventive and moving 2004 graphic novel.  The characters are well-formed and interesting.  The stories are simple and direct – no larger agenda – but with contemporary issues like H1 visas and love marriages.

A page from the graphic novel Corridor, by Sarnath Banerjee

I haven’t read Banerjee’s followup book yet, The Barn Owl’s Wonderous Capers, but maybe it’s in in the marriage between word and image that everyday India can be best conveyed.  I don’t really know.  I think Adiga has a larger agenda, and I’m not sure where to look next.  I find myself still waiting, and hoping, for the first writer to come out with a 21st century Midnight’s Children or A Suitable Boy — the brilliant story that says everything about India in the here and now, but without trying so hard to say everything about India in the here and now.